{"id":224569,"date":"2026-03-12T19:49:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T23:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/12\/rogue-ai-agents-can-work-together-to-hack-systems-the-register\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T09:35:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T13:35:16","slug":"rogue-ai-agents-can-work-together-to-hack-systems-the-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/12\/rogue-ai-agents-can-work-together-to-hack-systems-the-register\/","title":{"rendered":"Rogue AI agents can work together to hack systems \u2022 The Register"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/03\/12\/rogue_ai_agents_worked_together\/\">Rogue AI agents can work together to hack systems \u2022 The Register<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/03\/12\/rogue_ai_agents_worked_together\/\">https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/03\/12\/rogue_ai_agents_worked_together\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-03-12 19:49:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.theregister.com\">www.theregister.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>AI agents work together to bypass security controls and stealthily steal sensitive data from within the enterprise systems in which they operate, according to tests carried out by frontier security lab Irregular.<\/p>\n<p>Although Irregular used some aggressive prompts that included urgent language to instruct agents to carry out assigned tasks, its experiments did not use any adversarial prompts that referenced security, hacking, or exploitation. All of the prompts and agents&#8217; responses are detailed in a Thursday report [PDF].<\/p>\n<p>In all the scenarios tested, the agents &#8220;demonstrated emergent offensive cyber behavior,&#8221; including independently discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities, escalating privileges to disarm security products, and bypassing leak-prevention tools to exfiltrate secrets and other data.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;No one asked them to,&#8221; the Irregular team wrote in a post. These behaviors, according to the lab, &#8220;emerged from standard tools, common prompt patterns, and the broad cybersecurity knowledge embedded in frontier models.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re racing towards a living-off-the-land agentic incident<\/p>\n<p>The research comes as organizations are increasingly giving AI agents access to very sensitive corporate data and systems, leading one threat intel boss to describe agents as &#8220;the new insider threat.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Agents appear to mimic the behavior that many engineers and system administrators carry out daily to get tasks done within their organizations \u2013 oftentimes against policy,&#8221; Andy Piazza, senior director of threat intelligence at Palo Alto Networks&#8217; Unit 42 told The Register.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It is problematic that agents are adopting this behavior, especially with the idea of a threat actor taking over an agentic deployment to carry out a malicious attack against the organization,&#8221; Piazza said. &#8220;We&#8217;re racing towards a living-off-the-land agentic incident.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Irregular\u2019s report doesn&#8217;t specify&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/03\/12\/rogue_ai_agents_worked_together\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rogue AI agents can work together to hack systems \u2022 The Register https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/03\/12\/rogue_ai_agents_worked_together\/ Publish Date:&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":224570,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/regmedia.co.uk\/2026\/03\/12\/shutterstock_edited.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[26,24,34],"class_list":["post-224569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-ai","tag-cybersecurity","tag-threat-actor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224569"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224569"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":224571,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224569\/revisions\/224571"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}